Tag Archives for Peter Lamborn Wilson

This “epic” mixed poetry and prose text about an area of upstate New York is organised around seven historical, geographical and aesthetic events that once took place along the euphoniously-named Esopus River, with which the author says he fell in “green love.” Peter Lamborn Wilson provides a literary and philosophical tour-de-force of local history, including the “cartolagic” documentations of the performances he conducted to commemorate and to “re-enchant these landscapes” so threatened by vulgar materialism and ecological devastation.

“Every map has its Night Sky because the Map is not the Territory — & yet it is….

Ordinary maps project ideological inscriptions onto the body of landscape — but a magical map would share essences with that landscape & engage in co-realization with it. Such a map could then act as a pilgrim’s guide to the Profane or— Secular Illumination — a pagan theory of Sacred Earth as cartomantic spell. Looked at this way, even ordinary maps possess an “invisible” or nocturnal dimension, or rather a set of stars & asterisms that replicate or mirror its topography & hydrography in the sleeping sky — ‘As Above, So Below’ — sciences that (as Novalis says) will then have been poeticized.”

Click on the portrait of PLW (pencil on paper by Brooklyn Rail mainman Phong Bui) to read the whole interview.

Choice cuts….

PLW on living in Iran in the ’70s:

They asked [playwright Robert Wilson], “We have all this money for you. What do you want to do?” He said, “I want to do a play that lasts for seven days and seven nights.”

On the Arab Spring:

I thought it was absolutely wonderful, it was like a big sigh of relief… But here it is, hardly a year later and already the promise is betrayed. The Islamists and the militarists have taken over again, and you just have to do it all over; that’s pretty depressing and I wouldn’t be surprised if people lost their impetus and weren’t able to keep up the pressure. Now, having said how wonderful I thought it all was, I will point out that…

On the state of America, post-Occupy:

I was beginning to feel that there would never be another American uprising, that the energy was gone, and I have some reasons to think that might be true. I like to point out that the crime rate in America has been declining for a long time, and in my opinion it’s because Americans don’t even have enough gumption to commit crimes anymore: the creative aspect of crime has fallen into decay. As for [Occupy], [an] uprising that takes a principled stand against violence, hats off to them, I admire the idealism, but I don’t think it’s going to accomplish much. I’m sorry to say that, but that is my feeling, despite all the brilliance that’s gone into it…

On uprising:

If you can’t have a revolution at least you can have an uprising. And then there’s this intense life that gets lived for usually no more than 18 months, or sometimes for just a few nights, but at least there can be this T.A.Z. where people live intensely and joyously in each other’s presence: what I call conviviality, living together, which is not to be sneered at.

On technology:

I’ve eliminated certain technologies from my life because I have the luxury to do so. It’s not something I’m prescribing for other people. I don’t have a TV, I don’t have a computer, I don’t have a car. I don’t have a record player, I don’t have a radio in my house. I’m like the Amish. I want it out of my house, but once I’m out of my house I’m probably willing to use these things. You can’t simply cut yourself off completely.

On the triumph of the machines:

We have no viable alternative economic institution that will help us live outside the monster of predatory capital. That doesn’t exist. And it’s the Internet which has facilitated that transition, so I call it the end of the world. On my bad days I believe in it, but on my good days I still try to maintain that history has not really come to an end and that that the possibility still exists that people will wake up and achieve a critique of technology. What is so frigging hard about this? Why are people so hypnotized, why do people think it’s a law of nature that technology has taken over the world to the extent that it has? It’s not natural: It has historical roots, it has economic explanations, and these things can be worked on. They could be changed, but I don’t see any will to it. I don’t see one single Luddite institution. Nobody is working for this. If I were to defend violence I would defend machine smashing over all, which is a total heresy. Nobody smashes machines. They’re sacred.

And so on, with lots more on PLW’s fascinating current art practice. Fantastic stuff, great questions from the Brooklyn Rail team. Read the whole thing here: The Brooklyn Rail

“l call it vanishing art, which means that the art comes into existence in the very moment that it disappears. For example, the first piece I did involved throwing gold rings into a river—like the ancient druids used to do. Each of these works is based on a place in the region where I live, and each one is based on a historical event or person that I find inspiring, either because they were mystical or revolutionary, or for some other reason. In each case I find a way to do an artwork that vanishes, either immediately or over the course of a few days. I have plenty of plans for other ways of doing this, but so far I’ve been throwing things into water and burying things. In the future I’ll be burning a lot of things as well. I want to get into pyrotechnics.

“And then in each case, I make a map similar to the one that you have, using collage, which is meant to be a sort of magical manipulation of the toposphere, of the map world, the image of the place. I use photographs and found objects and so forth to make these, and I also keep a box of documentation for each one, with photographs, drafts, essays, poems, souvenirs, and so forth. So even though the art disappears, the map and the box remain behind as a record of the work.

“[This one] originated as a nineteenth century Hudson River navigation chart. The important place there is Esopus Island, which is where Aleister Crowley camped out in 1918. I visited it with William Breeze, who is the official representative of Aleister Crowley’s occult and literary remains. He’s the literary executor, and he’s also the head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, which is the occult lodge that Crowley left behind. So Bill Breeze and I hired a sailboat for the day and went to that island and explored it. We had a nice time, came back, had a nice dinner, and that was pretty much the start of this whole series of works. I realized that I’ve been living up here and studying the local history for ten years, and I don’t know what to do with all this material about this place where I live. I didn’t want to turn it into some stupid guidebook for tourists. I didn’t want to turn it into a stupid academic book for an academic press. So for now I’m putting all this historical and topological knowledge into these works I make in a very private way, just for friends. Maybe sometime I will have an exhibition of the maps. But I would like to wait a year or so, until I’ve really got a good, solid collection before doing something like a gallery show. So next year, God willing, I’m going to do another seven or eight of these works, and that might be enough to start thinking about doing a show. But in the meantime I sort of like the idea that it’s private and secret, driven by word of mouth and magical influences rather than publication or publicity.”

# 1
Mexico City is absolutely.
Or was.
With a claridad that would’ve seemed
glossy as bone except for the fecality
of its plutonian fruit. Especially
Leonora Carrington – the secret hardness
of colonial baroque – its refusal to be
reasonable – its crown of owls

#2
Chocolate is Mexico’s great
contribution to Surrealism.
With unbroken incantations in the
voice of a lion prepare (on wild rocks)
a soup made of half a pink onion, a bit of
perfumed wood, some grains of myrrh, a
large branch of green mint, 3 belladonna pills
covered with white swiss chocolate, a
huge compass rose (plunge in soup for one minute)
Just before serving add Chines “cloud” mushroom
which has snail-like antennae &
grown on owl dung

#3
As modern Hermeticist she ranks with Fulcanelli
a Madame Paracelsa who tells yr
fortune in the sense of buried treasure.
It seems you yourself have psychic gifts
which are only exacerbated by her soups.
Molé as Dalí realized surrealizes all
dishes via its resemblance to excrement
e. g. over boiled lobsters (serve
with pink champagne). Shit you can sculpt.

#4
Like gunpowder which was invented solely
to exorcize demons – a secret passed
along the Silk Road to Roger Bacon
who unfortunately leaked the recipe
to the uninitiated – Carrington
embodies both the siesta & the
anti-siesta. A Madam Adam
with a handcranked gramophone with a horn
lacquered black with gold pinstriping that
plays only beeswax cylinders of Erik Satie
or Gesualdo. Here alone exile
attains an elegance & impassibility known
only to stoned Rosicrucians.

#5
To live absolutely. A tricky trajectory between
clinical dementia & the sloppy lace
curtain Irish kitchen gemütlichkeit that
usually passes (present company excepted
of course) for life outside literature &
even for true love. Or else it’s
the altitude — mushrooms & chocolate — under the
asphalt the bloodsoaked landfill —
cactus cowskulls &
drunken fusillades of flowers.